Abu
Hamada, a 62-year-old civil engineer from the outskirts of Damascus, has not
built much for several years, and yet by his own calculations he has earned
about $2.34-million in the past six months. That is because since moving to
Egypt after the Syrian civil war started, this Syrian-Palestinian refugee has
found a far more lucrative line of work – smuggling.

As the
recent discovery of two unmanned “ghost ships” carrying hundreds of migrants to
Italy showed, refugees are looking to cross the Mediterranean in ever more
desperate ways, amid what the International
Organisation for Migration now believes is the world’s largest wave of mass
migration since the end of World War II.

And
newcomers to the smuggling trade are cashing in.
Barely a year after starting
business, Abu Hamada is the kingpin of the Syrian smuggling network in Egypt.
The majority of Syrians attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Egypt to
Italy are likely to sign up with one of his web of brokers. From May until
October, the period when the weather allowed for smuggling missions, Abu
Hamada’s men organised on average two trips a week, each earning him a profit
of at least $46 000.

Critics
say he is profiting from people’s misfortune, indifferent to their suffering
and in some cases causing it. Some of his team’s clients were on a
now-notorious ship that sank
near Malta in early
September, killing more than 300 people. “They are the worst kind of humans,”
says one of the gang’s would-be passengers, Osama, who was arrested –
fortunately, as it turned out – as he waited to board the doomed vessel. “They
don’t value anything apart from money.”

But
holding forth in the small hours of a recent morning, during what he says is
his first interview, Abu Hamada claims he’s the good guy. “What’s wrong with
making a profit?” he says, sitting with some of his assistants in a tea garden
in an affluent Cairo suburb. “If I’m making money at the same time as helping
my countrymen, what’s the problem? I’m the only person people can trust in this
business.”

The
European Union has scaled back its Mediterranean
rescue operation, in the hope that a reduction in the number of coastguards
will discourage migrants from attempting a voyage that claimed more than 3 000
lives in the past year. But such a strategy underestimates the demand for
smugglers such as Abu Hamada. Last year, he trafficked an estimated 10 000
people, and this year’s figure could be even higher.

There
is no one way of smuggling people
across the Mediterranean. Eritreans, Syrians, Palestinians and Egyptians are
among the many different migrants attempting to get to Europe from Egypt.
Interviews with two land-based smugglers, three ship-owners and dozens of
migrants suggest different communities have different networks, and that the
methods and terminologies used change from country to country, smuggler to
smuggler, and even from week to week.

‘You
don’t need to find them. They find you’

No single person
controls every aspect of every trip. Foreign brokers such as Abu Hamada and his
deputy and nephew Abu Uday (both are known by their nicknames) need Egyptian
colleagues to carry out certain aspects of the operation, particularly at sea.
But Abu Hamada is the central player in his network, the man through whom all
money passes. Without him, his trips would not happen.

The
process starts far from the sea itself. Individual migrants approach one of Abu
Hamada’s Syrian brokers in their neighbourhood and fix a price. “It’s very easy
to find someone – everyone knows a smuggler or two,” says Mehyar, a 23-year-old
Syrian refugee who successfully made the trip last year. “In fact, you don’t
need to find them. They find you.”

Abu
Hamada’s men claim they charge a fixed price of $1 900 a person, but in reality
the price fluctuates. Some pay as much as $3 500, some as low as $1 500. The
more you pay, the sooner you get to the boat.

All the
money will eventually flow into a central fund controlled by Abu Hamada, from
which he pays for the ship, the crew, his staff, transport costs and other
expenses. But first the migrant usually pays the money to a third party trusted
by both sides. Only when the passenger successfully reaches Italy should the
third party release the money to Abu Hamada.

“If the
ship sinks or it goes to Greece, we lose all the money,” says Abu Uday, an
engineer, like his uncle, in a past life. “It’s harder to get to [the rest of]
Europe from Greece.”

But if
the migrants arrive safely, there is money to be made – and not just for Abu
Hamada. Each boat of 200 passengers gives him a turnover of about $380 000. Of
this, he spends half on the boat and about $70 000 on the various costs related
to bussing migrants to the sea. A further $30 000 goes on housing the migrants
in the days before their departure. The boat crew get $15 000, as do the
brokers that find the migrants. After a few extra costs, Abu Hamada is usually
left at the end of every trip with a profit of about $45 000-$50 000.

To get
to the ship, migrants must first reach the port of Alexandria, Egypt’s second
city and the hub of the smuggling networks on the Egyptian coast. A few are
driven there directly, but Abu Hamada’s clients are given a time and place to
meet and make their own way there.

Once in
Alexandria, the migrants are hustled into shabby apartments in suburbs such as
Palm Beach and Miami. Their names are evocative of more prosperous places, but
in reality these are gloomy forests of tower blocks. And it is here that Abu
Hamada block-books dozens of apartments, all summer long, for use as a holding
bay for his clients before they leave for the ships.

“You
stay two or three days there,” says Osama, the Syrian refugee who tried to
travel with Abu Hamada this year. “Then they come and put a big group of you in
buses.” Under cover of darkness, these buses drive the migrants for several
hours to remote spots along the Mediterranean coast. If all goes to plan, which
it often doesn’t, they then board dinghies at the beach. The dinghies take them
to a larger vessel that carries them, hopefully, to Italy within a fortnight.

But few
make the ship on the first attempt. The weather, the police and the coastguards
can all force the buses to return to Alexandria for another night or more. One
Syrian interviewee said she has had 30 false starts, and after each attempt she
was brought back to Alexandria. She is still stuck in Egypt.

The
buses are organised by an Egyptian – known in the business as the monassek or
dalil – and it is at this point that Abu Hamada’s and Abu Uday’s control of
proceedings begins to loosen. As foreigners, they say their relationship with
the Egyptian authorities is weak. But, they claim, to get several busloads of
illegal migrants to the shore, let alone to international waters, some level of
government complicity is required. Which is where the monassek comes in.

They
say the monassek is paid by Abu Hamada – about $340 a passenger – to shepherd
the migrants from the apartments to the large smuggling vessel that lies
several kilometres off shore, and to deal with any government officials who might
cause problems.

“We
can’t bring them ourselves,” says Abu Uday, who does most of the talking for
his uncle. “So we’re forced to go to the Egyptian middleman. He takes them from
the apartments to the specific beaches, according to the deal with the
government. Then he takes the people from the beaches on little boats to the
bigger boat.”

Talk to
most Egyptian middlemen and ship owners, and they will deny having a
relationship with police and coastguards. “Of course we don’t. The Egyptian
security is very keen to fight this sort of thing,” says one Egyptian smuggler,
who gives his name as Captain Hamdy.

“There
is no coordination with the coastguards, and people who say otherwise are
lying,” adds a prominent fisherman in a coastal town known for its smugglers.
“And the proof is that there are more than 10 trials ongoing for people
involved in the smuggling business.”

Egypt’s
interior ministry spokesperson, General Hany Abdel Latif, also strenuously denies
the accusation. A smuggler “is a criminal outlaw who just wants to defraud
people, take their money, and it doesn’t make any difference to them if the
people die,” he told the Guardian.
“Do you expect credibility from such a person? We already arrested many of them
and the others will be busted [soon].”

Complicity

But Abu Uday is
adamant that, in his network at least, it is the monassek’s job to ensure the
complicity of relevant government officials. “They just take care of one
thing,” he says. “They deal with the authorities.”

In
exchange for allowing smugglers to leave from certain points, Abu Uday claims,
officials are paid up to 100 000 Egyptian pounds (about $13 800) a trip. By
agreement with the smugglers, police arrive after most of the migrants have
managed to leave the beach. At that point, the remaining passengers are
arrested and taken for a few days’ detention in police cells, to maintain the
pretence that Egypt is playing its part in ending the smuggling trade.

“It’s
normal that if I want to smuggle 300 [migrants],” says Abu Uday, “the
authorities will take 50 and let 250 go, to show the Italians that they are
doing some work.”

Migrants
report similar stories. Three Syrian refugees, Osama, Loai and Tariq, were
taken by Abu Hamada’s gang to a beach in August last year. Those who got to the
beach first made it to the ship, and later died at sea. Those who got there
last – like Osama, Loai and Tariq – were arrested on arrival at the beach. In
separate interviews, the trio claimed that the men who helped the police to
round them up were the same men who had led them to the water’s edge.

Later,
during an interrogation at the police station, Osama mentioned the smugglers by
name. Hours later, he got a call from Abu Uday. The police had told the
smugglers that Osama had informed on them.

A third
Abu Hamada customer, a Syrian refugee who asked to be named as Ahmed, was
arrested in a similar way several days later. While in detention, Ahmed claims
a coastguard officer confirmed the relationship between the smugglers and the
authorities.

“Do you
think the smugglers could leave without us knowing?” the officer allegedly told
Ahmed. “We know about each trip from the smugglers themselves. Some we leave,
some we don’t … We tell them that we have to arrest 80% and let 20% go.”

Each
trip, about 300 migrants make it to a large fishing boat, lurking several miles
out to sea. The boat belongs to Abu Hamada: for every trip, he pays Egyptian
associates – usually fishermen known by nicknames such as “the Whale”, and “the
Doctor” – to source a new one.

But as
a Syrian-Palestinian, the boat cannot be listed in his name, and in the eyes of
the law, it still belongs to the Egyptian he “buys” it from. Abu Hamada never
sees the ship, and he does not choose its crew – who are usually out-of-work
fishermen – or when and where it leaves from. In coordination with the
monassek, it is the boat-owner who decides where a trip should leave from.

“The
Syrian pays the money for the boat, but I handle everything else,” says one
Egyptian boat owner who deals with Syrian gangs. “I find and pay the captain, I
find the boat, and it’s my name on the boat documents.”

‘The GPS is the captain’

What
this means is that Abu Hamada, exploiter of migrants, is sometimes exploited
himself. Of the roughly $380 000 he receives for every trip, he spends about
half on what he thinks is a new, steel-hulled boat. His assistants proudly show
the Guardian a picture of what they
believe to be their latest purchase, a gleaming new vessel, painted green.

But in
reality the Egyptian fishermen sometimes use old and faulty wooden boats
instead. “The [Egyptian] smuggler will buy any old boat from me because he
doesn’t care about its quality,” says one seller of secondhand boats.

Even if
a new boat is purchased, the sailors who control it are often loth to use it to
get to Italy. The boats that reach Italian waters are often impounded, so
smugglers prefer to make the trip using the most expendable vessels. This means
the sailors sometimes force the migrants to move from new boats to smaller and
older ones several days into their voyage – a frightening and dangerous
procedure that risks overloading already rickety vessels. Survivors of the
catastrophic sinking in September,
which killed more than 300 off the coast of Malta, say the crash occurred after
the migrants were asked to change boats.

In the
past month a new and still more ruthless tactic has emerged. To avoid being
stopped by Italian authorities, smugglers are now presenting their vessels as
legal entities until they are within a few kilometres of Italy. Then the crew
disembark, forcing the Italian authorities to intervene to save lives.

An
Egyptian ship owner involved in the smuggling business told the Guardian that
his associates used similar tactics, and often left their vessels in the hands
of untrained charges “who don’t know how to sail”.

“They
only have GPS,” said the ship owner, who asked to be known as Abu Khaled, from
a port on Egypt’s north coast. “So the driver doesn’t have any more sailing
knowledge than this. He just follows the arrow. The GPS is the captain.”

Abu
Hamada says his crews don’t use this tactic, claims what happens at sea is
beyond his control, and expresses regret at the deaths of some of his customers
in September. “Why is everyone attacking me?” he asks. “You should be attacking
the ship owners. If you want to say they’re trading in souls, you’d be right.” But
the way his team treat his clients back on land is hardly any better. Several migrants
criticised the exhausting and humiliating process of trying to reach the right
departure beach, night after night.

Each
evening, migrants are crammed into small buses and driven for hours to whatever
beach has been allocated for that day’s departure. Often the journey is in
vain. Either the weather or the police force the smugglers to cancel the trip.

If it
does go ahead, often there’s only time for some of the migrants to go to sea –
usually those who still have the money to bribe the smugglers. The rest are
either arrested or driven back to Alexandria, and sometimes forced to remain on
board the bus until the following evening’s attempt. “We did this trip five or
six times – every day without going back into the flat,” remembers Osama.

Several
migrants report being beaten by the smugglers. Two claimed they were robbed by
them. A third said their bus was car-jacked by Bedouin tribesmen as it neared a
remote beach. “It was one whole month of unfortunate events,” says Osama. “We
saw things we never saw in our lives before – even in Syria.”

Britain
has all but withdrawn
its support for EU-led rescue
missions in the Mediterranean, in the belief that sea patrols encourage more
migrants to attempt the crossing. But such a strategy underestimates the greed
of the smugglers and the desperation of the smuggled.

Despite
the risks and despite the
callousness of their traffickers, Syrian refugees say they would try again and
again to cross the Mediterranean with the help of people like Abu Hamada.

The
horrors of Syria, and the subsequent prejudice and poverty they face in
countries such as Egypt, give them no other choice.

“Why do
we keep going by sea?” asks Ahmed. “Because we trust God’s mercy more than the
mercy of people here.”